


blind spots

by fanfoolishness (LoonyLupin), LoonyLupin



Series: Level 10: Agents of Shield Fic [10]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Brain Damage, F/M, Post-Episode: s01e22 Beginning of the End, Post-Framework Universe (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 15:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18994987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/fanfoolishness, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoonyLupin/pseuds/LoonyLupin
Summary: Fitz struggles with what he doesn't know he doesn't know.  Spoilers through 6x03.





	blind spots

Terror.  It threatens to overwhelm him.  It’s unstoppable, pounding in his veins, screaming in his ears, making him shake so hard he can barely get the words out.   **  
**

He’s so incredibly scared, stomach roiling, sweat pouring off him in buckets, legs jittering, but he won’t be a coward in this.  He won’t take the easy way.  It has to be him.  So he tells her how he feels, and she gives him the answer he knew she would, and that’s all right, really, it’s all right, it’s all right --

He breathes in.  Tries to remember how it feels, that sweetness of air within his lungs.  Jemma’s the biologist, not him, but you don’t get to be this clever without picking up things here and there.  He knows the basics.  He imagines nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen needed and necessary deep in his chest.  Molecules filling his bronchioles and alveoli, isn’t that right?  

It’s much less neat a process than any human feat of engineering.  He could make it more efficient by far.  Why does biology need to be so messy?  He wonders it, ponders it, not for the first time.  Maybe for the last.  

His shaking hands close into fists at his side.  Jemma doesn’t notice.  She’s terrified, too, but there’s one thing he knows that she doesn’t, here in this awful place.

She’s going to make it.

He looks at her, fixes her face in his mind.  She’s beautiful, even here, even at the end.  He swallows. Steels himself.  He’s ready.

Fitz’s fist smashes the release, and the ocean rushes in.

 

***

 

He’d never known how  _hungry_  you could be for a thing that wasn’t food.  Never knew you could take the concept of hunger, turn it over, flip it inside out, until it was a ravening roar in his lungs and his head, until he gulped cold salt water in a desperate reflex, his pale hands flailing, clawing at the rushing water in the dark, and all he knew was an insatiable --

What was the word again?

He mutters to himself, the memory fading.  It’s hard to pay attention now.  He fumbles with his tools irritably, his hands weak and spasming, and metal clatters on the desk.  He wonders, not for the first time, if this is a dream.

He reaches out for her hand on his shoulder, and she’s a warm and gentle comfort, even though something about her hand in his makes him… uncertain.

Has he been here before?  Hard to remember sometimes, with these blank patches in his head, things he doesn’t know he doesn’t know.  Blind spots, Jemma calls them.  

They’re bloody maddening.  He wishes, not for the first time, that he had her patience.

He drifts again, the world around him gauzy, insubstantial.  Like a dream.  That’s what it’s called, isn’t it?  The thought feels familiar, but he can’t say why.  He struggles to come up with the missing words, with the -- with the -- dammit, there’s just the  _blanks_ , the  _empty_ , the  _things he doesn’t know what they are_  --

She leaves.  He stays.

And for a long while, her absence is a thing he doesn’t know he doesn’t know.

 

***

 

That’s it, isn’t it?  Total brain injury.  TBI.  The others forget sometimes these days, and almost he could forget with them.

But the thing of it is, it’s not a sometimes thing.  It’s an  _always_ , it’s a  _forever_ thrumming beneath his everyday.

It’s in the way his fingers trip a little, now and then, over shoelaces.  It’s in flashes of anger, sudden, fierce, unreasonable, a feeling he’d never allowed himself before.  It’s in broken sleep, bad dreams, memories of the ocean and a monolith and traumas that somehow never seem to  _leave_.

Jemma remembers, Jemma knows: but she knows it from the outside looking in, the scientist dispassionate, the lover sympathetic, neither one knowing exactly what it feels like.  He wishes he had the words.

The others move on.  Fitz?  He just moves, but the weight of it all staggers with him, and his broken brain makes the best of things it can.  He stumbles with a smile, always with the nagging feeling that he might not know what he doesn’t know.

Still, pretending he’s fine gets easier all the time.

 

***

 

 _Doctor_  sears in his mind, a howling shame, gorge rising within his throat.  She will never understand.  She will never know his life there was real, his orders real, his coldness real, real, real.  How could she?  The love in her eyes only makes the blood on his hands redder.  Years stretch back behind him, twenty years of cruelty and selfishness and HYDRA, and the stink of them buries itself into his DNA.  Fitz is Leopold is Fitz, and he knows it, deep in gut and bone.

This is a breaking altogether different than the lack of oxygen and nitrogen, a breaking altogether worse.

He buckles against her, reeling, sobs choking in his throat, and he knows he will never be able to undo this.

 

***

 

Fitz stands in an alien casino, a foreign chip in his hand, a scowl on his face.  The Universe laughs in a filthy roar and Enoch buzzes in his ear like a computerized mosquito, and Fitz wonders if he’ll ever get back to his Jemma.  

The Doctor hums in his head, a chilled toneless tune.  He’s not sure if he’ll ever be free of him; he wonders if he’ll trail along like an airless gasp no matter where Fitz goes, no matter what kind of man he tries to be.

Still, though.  Fuck the Doctor.  

The thought warms him.  Fitz’s hand closes over the chip.  He breathes in.  The air here smells of smoke and sulfur, but it’s air, and it’s enough.

Jemma’s out there somewhere in a confusing swirl of time and space.  He knows it, feels it pulling at him, a certainty rich and raw.  They need to find each other, once and for all.

He manages a tight smile, aliens and Enoch bustling around the corners of his vision.  There’s one thing he knows that they don’t, here in this strange place.

He’s going to make it.

**Author's Note:**

> Will these two ever be okay????


End file.
